


With Kindness and Warmth

by Luz



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, M/M, Reading Aloud, Sick Character, Sickfic, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6952561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luz/pseuds/Luz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam falls ill and Ronan takes care of him. Grossly influenced by nineteenth century Gothic literature (as per usual). Set sometime after TRB and sometime before TRK.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Kindness and Warmth

**Author's Note:**

> It’s not a Gothic novel if it doesn’t involve a cloyingly intense bromance. Similarly, it’s not a research session for me if it doesn’t involve drawing ridiculous comparisons to my current fandom. God, I’m a loser. Title and quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Also let’s ignore the continuity issues between the amount of time they spend reading and the actual quotes used okay thanks.)

Adam Parrish was so, so tired.

He had just needed to get through this week, this week of hell - two major papers, a high pressure oral exam in Latin, and on Friday a devilishly tricky calculus midterm. This had been followed by a weekend so filled with shifts at his various jobs that he wouldn’t have been able to get enough sleep if he had napped during every one of his breaks. Now it was Sunday night, he had been sent home from the garage because his boss was worried he was about to keel over, and he needed to go to sleep.

It wasn’t the regular exhaustion he felt after every shift at the garage. That exhaustion felt almost like a reward, like proof that Adam was working at something. This was another level. It was a hollowness, a deadness. Nothing - nothing - mattered like falling into bed did. Adam could have seen his dead grandmother standing on the street in front of him and it wouldn’t have distracted him from going to sleep. He had to be up in six hours for school but the thought barely crossed his mind in his singleminded state.

He slept soundlessly and blackly.

*

Ronan Lynch didn’t know where the hell Adam was. He was one of the most punctual people Ronan knew, especially when someone was doing him a favor like picking him up for school. It wasn’t really a favor, Ronan reminded himself, just as he routinely reminded Adam. He passed St. Agnes every morning anyway.

When another glance in his mirror assured him Adam wasn’t on his way to the BMW, Ronan swore and got out of the car. If he was late to first period again Milo was going to have his head.

*

Adam heard the banging on his door as one hears sound underwater. Somewhere in the back of his muddled mind he knew that it meant he needed to get out of bed, but the task seemed so impossible that he couldn’t even consider beginning it. His head pulsed with a headache that made his skull feel weighted to the pillow. With a monumental effort he pushed himself out of bed. He was covered in sweat, but as the cool air of the room hit his skin he began to shiver violently.

By the time he got to the door the pounding had stopped. Adam cracked it open cautiously to see an agitated Ronan Lynch pressing his phone to the side of his razored head.

 _Ronan. Morning. School._ Disjointed thoughts and a vague sense of dread pinballed around his head, exacerbating his headache.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. He’s right here. God damn it, Parrish.” Ronan glared down at his phone and jabbed at the screen to end the call, abruptly cutting off Gansey's distant fretting. “What the hell, man?” he snapped.

Adam just stood there, swaying slightly. For a moment it looked like there were two Ronans standing in front of him. They were becoming visibly more annoyed.

“Parrish,” they said, like it was a swear word. “Snap out of it.”

Adam wasn’t aware he was falling over until Ronan was catching him, annoyance transmuting into shock.

“I think I’m sick,” Adam said, voice barely more than a scratchy gasp.

“No fucking shit,” Ronan replied. “Come on.” He helped Adam back into his room with an arm wrapped around him.

“Give me five minutes,” Adam rasped. “Just gotta change.”

Ronan’s eyebrows shot up. “What? Parrish, no, you are not going to school. You’re a goddamn biohazard. They’d put you in quarantine.”

Adam was too exhausted to put up more of a fight but the thought of missing an entire day’s worth of schoolwork coiled sinisterly in the back of his mind. It was so easy to get behind at Aglionby, and that wasn’t a rabbit hole Adam wanted to fall into. 

“I’m staying to make sure you don’t die,” Ronan announced.

“No,” Adam mumbled. “I’m okay.”

Ronan was silent but Adam could hear him considering. He knew Ronan couldn’t afford to miss much more school than he already had, and Adam prayed that he would decide to go in. Adam would survive on his own.

“Nope,” Ronan finally decided. “You’re definitely not okay. Here.” He went to the little kitchen and filled a chipped mug with water and set it by Adam’s bed. “Drink as much as you can. I’ll be back. Your shithole house doesn’t have any supplies.”

He left Adam wondering what _supplies_ he could possibly be referring to. He fell back asleep almost instantly, and woke to Ronan coming in again an hour later.

“Don’t worry,” Ronan was saying. “I texted Gansey to get notes for you or whatever. These cell phone things sure come in handy.” He cackled to himself and set the plastic bags he was carrying on the counter out of Adam’s sight.

He tried to sit up but could only succeed in propping himself on an elbow. “What is that,” he asked, shivering.

“Relax,” Ronan called. “It doesn’t count as charity if it’s keeping you alive. And this I dreamt, so you don’t owe me shit.” He reappeared with something large and silky the pale green color of a flower bud. 

“What is it,” Adam croaked, laying back down.

“A blanket.” Ronan sounded proud of himself. 

“Got one,” Adam said, moving his hand weakly beneath his threadbare quilt. 

“No, dumbshit,” Ronan said. “It’s special. You think I’d just dream up a normal blanket? Look, it’s thermoregulating. It’ll keep you warm but ventilated.” He pulled the quilt off Adam and tucked the green blanket around him. Adam thought he caught the same expression on Ronan’s face that he’d seen him wear at the Barns while he cared for baby mice and his father’s sleeping herd. Adam didn’t know how he felt about that.

Ronan had done a good job with the blanket, though. As he lay under it Adam felt warmer than he had under the quilt, but he could tell that air was still circulating through it, keeping him more comfortable. “Did you drink water?” Ronan demanded.

Adam didn’t respond so Ronan shoved the mug at him. “You gotta.”

Adam groaned softly but he drank, and the water did soothe his raw throat a bit. Ronan took the mug from him once it was empty, refilled it, and brought it back.

“What are you gonna do?” Adam asked after he drank some more.

“Live. Breathe. Hopefully not catch whatever you have because, man, you look like shit.”

Adam sighed, grimaced at the ache in his chest. “Your bedside manner could use some work.”

Ronan ended up sprawled on Adam’s floor, playing on his phone. Blue had downloaded some game apps for him in an attempt to get him to use it more often, and now Ronan could be found checking up on his menagerie of virtual pets every hour. When he tired of this, he stood up and stretched, looking around.

“Your place is boring as hell.”

Adam, who was half asleep again, didn’t have the energy to respond. Ronan started pacing from the door to the window to the kitchen and back.

“Stop,” Adam muttered. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Well, what else am I supposed to do?”

“You could go to school. Or home. Or literally anywhere else.”

Ronan scowled. “Not with you in this state. Gansey would kill me if you died while I was supposed to be looking after you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Man, you can’t even get out of bed.”

Adam couldn’t argue with this, even if he did think Ronan was acting unnecessarily concerned. He had an idea. “There’s a book in my backpack,” he said. He had been meaning to try to get ahead on his English reading that weekend. Eternal optimism. “If you read it to me we’ll both actually have accomplished something today.”

“ _Frankenstein_?” Ronan said, sneering at the cover. “Looks boring.”

“I’m behind enough already,” Adam rasped. “This’ll help. And you’re supposed to be reading it too, you know.”

Ronan’s lips were scornful, but he let the book fall open to Adam’s bookmark.

“ _But I was in reality very ill, and surely nothing but the unbounded and unremitting attentions of my friend could have restored me to life_ ,” he read. “Ha! Sounds like you, Parrish.”

Adam groaned. “Will you just read it?” Ronan snickered some more, but returned to the text.

Adam found himself lost in the cadence of Ronan’s voice more than in the meaning of the words he read. Like this, his tone was impartial and not as colored by emotion as it normally was - no savagery, no sarcasm. He read for almost two hours before complaining that his voice was tired. By then the hard March sun was shining in earnest through the window. “Are you hungry?” he asked Adam.

Adam shrugged as well as he could in a prone position. He could eat something, but he felt no pressing desire to. Ronan took his noncommittal gesture as affirmation and moved into the kitchen, rustling through the plastic bags.

Fifteen minutes later he brought Adam a steaming bowl of soup. “Don’t get too excited, it came from a can,” he said, but Adam tucked in eagerly. The hot salty broth soothed his throat even more than the water had and as he ate he realized how hungry he had been. Food hadn’t crossed his mind the night before, putting his last real meal at nearly twenty four hours ago.

After he had eaten Adam fell into the halfway sleep of the ill. Distantly he heard Ronan washing up dishes and humming quietly. Cabeswater, which had been silent for the past few days, prodded gently at the back of his mind. Gentle wasn’t something Adam was used to feeling from Cabeswater, and he didn’t have any trouble communicating to it that he couldn’t help just then. It retreated almost politely, leaving in its wake the scent of rain, and Adam wondered if Ronan had something to do with its forgiving nature today. Ronan’s connection with the forest wasn’t something he understood completely, but he suspected that it was stronger or at least more complicated than his own bond with it.

When he wandered into full consciousness again the sun had faded, its last beams coming in weakly through the window. He expected Ronan to have gone, but he was sitting on the floor near Adam’s bed, back against the wall, long legs folded up. To Adam’s surprise he was reading Frankenstein again. He followed the words with his finger as he read and his other hand worried over his close hair. His lips were slightly parted and he looked like he had sounded reading aloud - open, bare.

“ _The Modern Prometheus_ ,” Adam croaked.

Ronan looked up sharply. “What.”

Adam tipped his chin at the book and Ronan glanced down at it. He was all hard edges again. “Yeah, whatever. I think you should go back to sleep.”

Adam sat up and leaned on the wall, pulling the green blanket around his shoulders. The pain in his joints had subsided. His head felt lighter, and when he spoke his throat was tender rather than caustic. “I actually feel a lot better.”

Ronan eyed him critically as if he doubted his judgment. “Are you sure? You still kinda look like shit.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “I always look like this.”

“No you don’t,” Ronan said immediately. Adam raised his eyebrows and Ronan looked away and picked at the sole of his boot. “Guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then,” he said abruptly as he got up from the floor, patting his jeans for his keys.

“Ronan,” Adam said, “thanks.”

Ronan shrugged, his hands in his pockets. “It’s no big deal.”

“I mean it,” Adam said truthfully. Ronan waved his hand dismissively, but he ducked his head and scuffed at the floor with his toe.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and his voice was close again to the version of itself he had used while he was reading to Adam. He cleared his throat. “Get some more rest.”

After he left, the room was silent but his artifacts remained. The smell of soup lingered in the kitchen and the book lay on the floor. Adam heard the BMW start outside his window, went to it, and watched as Ronan drove away. Then he picked up the book, which was splayed open on the page Ronan had been reading.

_Excellent friend! How sincerely did you love me and endeavour to elevate my mind until it was on a level with your own! A selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me until your gentleness and affection warmed and opened my senses; I became the same happy creature who, a few years ago, loved and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care…_

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments really make my day (:


End file.
